Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

[synack]

I'm in the 'data paranoid' group as well!
Mine:

1 - Data on separate drive from boot drive
2 - Backup all disks to a Time Capsule
3 - CrashPlan all disks to the cloud and to a FreeBSD server with ZFS raid5 array running snapshots, basically a second time machine
4 - Boot to Ubuntu every month and dd the boot drive to a dated image and to a live, bootable disk

My biggest issue is that I can't find a ZFS snapshot / time machine -like backup for incremental boot disk backups without rebooting every night (which i don't do...current uptime is 23 days). I've got a UniBeast stick and rBoot ready if something goes wrong.

 

[lordanubis]

I use this. I called it BlackUp - a fart between a secret BackUp action at night ( BlackOpp ) and it runs by a daemon ( spook )

Its semi like TM. But it keeps the permission oke, I mean it does't change them like TM does. There is a permission --flag for osx in rsync, but not used here.

It copies the changed files to the new date-time folder of 'now', but has links to the not changed data in the same folder.
It looks like that you have a set of complete folders that has all your files as of today, or yesterday, or two months ago, at the dates of the folder.
You can make a second script that deletes the folders that are the same as the previous day. That way you can see when there is a folder or file changed. This cost however a lot of process time. BTW this is for local connected/mounted drives. I start this script every night with launchd.
In a new version I use a lock file to check if it is running and works over SSH. Did have an issue last month, but was my fault not my script, but did want to solved that to, human mistakes. ;-)

This is a working part of the bigger script.

#!/bin/sh
# (c) RvAmerongen 2008
# BlackUp
# manually use of plist file
# launchctl load -wF plistfile
# launchctl unload -w plistfile
# launchctl stop plist
# launchctl start plist
# launchctl list

#echo "1. $1"
#echo "2. $2"
if [ 2 -ne $# ]; then
cat << EOU

BlackUp - a Black-Opp backup action at Night
( c ) 2008 - R v Amerongen

Usage: $0 Source-Directory backUp-Directory
Structure will be copied as links to a directory
named backup with the backup date.
Meanwhile there will be a latest Directory
created with a link to the latest backup Directory.

EOU
exit 10
fi
SourcePath="$1"
BackUpPath="$2"

CurrentPath=$BackUpPath"/LatestBU"
BackUpDestPath=$BackUpPath/back-`date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S"`
#echo $SourcePath

#echo $BackUpDestPath
if [ -d "$SourcePath" ]
then
mkdir -p $BackUpPath
mkdir -p $CurrentPath
rsync -qaPEog --super --link-dest=$CurrentPath $SourcePath $BackUpDestPath
rm -fR $CurrentPath
ln -s $BackUpDestPath $CurrentPath
else
echo "Source is not available, please check your source path!"
fi

Double Post Deleted!

 

[Nodarkthings]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

As an oooooold Mac user, I second SiliconVoid: Disk Utility has pretty much anything you need, it’s free and integrated in OSX!
Why bother with anything else?
(even the typical Mac users often ignore what Disk Utility can do out of repairing permissions... )


I use it to store the various systems I need (basic 10.4 and 10.5 for my PPC) or at different states during upgrades (10.6 on my Dell Mini 9, for the time being)...
When you restore such a .dmg image, check the Erase option, it will take only a few minutes, instead of maybe one hour or worse (of course depending on its size).
I’d be happy if someone is interested to make a small guide of the procedure and some tricks I found.


To give you an idea, note that a bare 10.6 .dmg backup is between 3 and 4 Gb. Of course, stuffed with every possible applications, it becomes too heavy: that’s maybe when using a third party utility might be useful (to exclude the Applications folder, for example, from the backup).


The need for a third party utility can be also for syncing your internal drive (or partition) with an external one (incremental backups) — if like me you don’t use Time Machine. My favourite is "Synchronize! Pro X", pretty expensive, but after many trials it's simply the best in terms of speed, precision and ease of use (compared to Chronosync or any app with "sync" in its name ).

I'll add that I'm a great fan of partitioning (keeping Users on a separate partition, or better: on a different internal drive — it can boost a bit your system, and incidentally makes backup easier in some way, but you need to know what you do); partitioning also allows you to have different systems on the same disk: one for regular use, one for testing, one for another version (i.e. if you wanna use Lion for regular use and SL for your old audio apps like ProTools ).

One final note: everything is debatable so you'll probably bump in someone convinced of something different, but I made my tests and made my practice across the years, now.

 

[davidr418]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

As an oooooold Mac user, I second SiliconVoid: Disk Utility has pretty much anything you need, it’s free and integrated in OSX! Why bother with anything else?

Well, because a DMG file you made with Disk Utility isn't a backup; it's a snapshot of your drive.

• Since Disk Utility isn't scriptable, you have to remember to run it manually. Backups you have to run manually are backups that don't get done.
• Disk Utility doesn't do incremental backups. It duplicates your entire disk, every time.
• Disk Utility doesn't do versioning (obviously), so the only way to retrieve older versions of your files is to keep multiple DMG files. That gets kinda big.
• Disk Utility doesn't verify that the DMG files it produces actually match the disk they were created from. There are no checksums or other error-detection and correction mechanisms in the DMG file. Since you noted you only keep one copy of your disk, if there's a problem you're screwed.

Time Machine has its own deficiencies, but it's vastly superior to Disk Utility as a backup mechanism.

 

[VideoLasVegas]

We've been duping our hard drives for quite some time. With a Hackintosh you never know when an update will cause problems and this gives us a fresh start with no hassles. Rather than using a software solution we use an inexpensive hard drive duplicator. They cost anywhere from $40 to around $100 and they have two docking slots; one for the source and one for the target. It takes about 2 hours to backup a 1TB drive. We have one from Star Tech and another from Bytecc. To take the process further, when we build a new system, we clone a drive from a similar MB system, mount it as an external drive on a working system and run Multibeast and anything else needed to match the new system. This way we don't have to install applications or any of the other time consuming new systems steps.

 

[tonyd]

Carbon Copy Cloner is a work in progress. It is a fantastic application which backs up partitions including creating and backing up the recovery partition if you have created one, and is always being updated. I did not find that SuperDuper receives as much attention, although I stand corrected if this is not the case, I have both but CCC is the King.

Time Machine is great for individual files but so Sloooow to restore full drives, so belt and braces Carbon Copy for redundancy and time machine as a just in case.

 

[Pepetico]

i use the time machine and work fine for me.. is exelent....

 

[kwalter]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

I can recommend Chronosync as well - I'm a professional photographer and I've been regularly backing my photos up to a QNAP device for over three years now without any problems

I use Time Machine, but for cloning my Hackintosh drive, I've been using Chronosync (which I use for other stuff as well).

 

[amoretam]

hi people I am stuck with carbon cory here, I did a full backup on one of my 320gb usb hdd partitions (created for this) and everything goes well but when I try to check if it would boot it doesn't.

I later read that installing chimera in the cloned partition is a requirement for a customac, I did that and still the same. It gets stuck on the apple and clock waiting...

Anybody knows what could be happening here??

Also I did the Checksum stuff and it went fine, I mean I re-ran the same task but with checksum box checked..

Thanks a lot...

 

[amoretam]

hi people, I bought CCC the other day but I can't find a way to clone my system incrementally and then be able to recover from any point in time I want... With acronis True image this was so easy and I am very used to that flow..

If CCC can do it, would someone please explain me how to do that, I did the initial backup and was able to boot from that backup after installing chimera.... then I did some changes in my system and would like to backup only the changes but I also want to be able to recover from the first one.... an so on.

If it is not possible from CCC, please direct to some that does..
Time machine has its limits, I.E not bootable backups...
Disk Utility does not create incrementals as long as I know...

What do people do in this case??

THANKSS